The War on Terror, confusing and anxious-making as it may be, has produced one encouraging side effect in American politics: The gung-ho is gone as all sides concede the military effort in Afghanistan is a dangerous enterprise with an unknowable outcome.
As President Obama goes face-to-face with General McChrystal today by tele-conference, the debate over what to do next has been a good deal less rancorous than any other in recent Washington history. "Dithering" has been the harshest accusation against the White House by Congressional Republicans, as the Administration leaks reports of success against Al Qaeda by covert operations.
On PBS, GOP Sen. Saxby Chambliss agrees with the Democrats' Carl Levin that "just putting troops out there is not going to guarantee success" and argues for more reliance on the military judgment than Levin is willing to accept, a far different tone than partisan disagreements over the Surge in Iraq.
As wrenching as what's at stake is, it's heartening to see some semblance of sanity in American politics, the disappearance of which Tom Friedman laments today: "Our leaders, even the president, can no longer utter the word 'we' with a straight face. There is no more 'we' in American politics at a time when 'we' have these huge problems."
On the fringes, the overheated rhetoric goes on, from Gore Vidal on the Left expressing disappointment in Obama and predicting "dictatorship soon" to a Republican Congressman calling the President "an enemy of humanity."
In a perverse way, Afghanistan with all of its corruption and complexity is bringing back serious thought to political debate at a time when the substance of issues has been degraded into a 24/7 circus of media slanders.
Granted that self-interest is, as always, involved in both Republican and Democratic reluctance to stake their political futures on either going all in or pulling out of another quagmire in the making, the resulting focus on what's at stake there and how to going about dealing with it is a partial answer to Friedman's worries about "a different kind of American political scene that makes me wonder whether we can seriously discuss political issues any longer and make decisions on the basis of the national interest."
Whatever the outcome of White House deliberations on Afghanistan, they offer the faint hope that maybe "we" can.
Showing posts with label Iraq Surge. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Iraq Surge. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Obama's Bay of Pigs?
Today's suicide-bombing of an Iraq peace conference and the American commander's warning that we are "not winning" in Afghanistan are sobering reminders that the Obama troop withdrawal plan did not close the file on US misadventures in the Middle East.
They underscore the final assessment of Thomas Ricks' new book, "The Gamble": "The quiet consensus emerging among many people who have served in Iraq is that we likely will have American soldiers engaged in combat in Iraq until at least 2015--which would put us not at about the midpoint in the conflict...In other words, the events for which the Iraq war will be remembered probably have not yet happened."
Ricks, whose new book along with "The Fiasco" constitute the definitive reporting on Iraq, concludes, "The surge was the right step to take, or more precisely, the least wrong move in a misconceived war...The surge campaign was effective in many ways, but the best grade it can be given is a solid incomplete. It succeeded tactically but fell short strategically."
His indictment of the military commanders who are now advising Obama includes the question by a retired officer. "Why did the American military establishment so fail to come up with a war-winning strategy that it was up to a retired general and a civilian think thank...to do their job? This is a stunning indictment of the American military's top leadership."
Today's Baghdad bombing with a toll of 33, along with an attack that killed 28 on Sunday, according to the New York Times, "suggest a renewed ability by insurgents to mount more effective suicide bombings, after a long period in which such attacks were relatively few and less lethal because of heavy security precautions."
With all the attention on the economy, there are sobering indications that the American Military Establishment may not have changed much since it misled another new American president into the Bay of Pigs almost half a century ago. Like Obama, JFK had the brains but not the experience to understand what he was being drawn into.
Kennedy learned fast. Will Obama?
They underscore the final assessment of Thomas Ricks' new book, "The Gamble": "The quiet consensus emerging among many people who have served in Iraq is that we likely will have American soldiers engaged in combat in Iraq until at least 2015--which would put us not at about the midpoint in the conflict...In other words, the events for which the Iraq war will be remembered probably have not yet happened."
Ricks, whose new book along with "The Fiasco" constitute the definitive reporting on Iraq, concludes, "The surge was the right step to take, or more precisely, the least wrong move in a misconceived war...The surge campaign was effective in many ways, but the best grade it can be given is a solid incomplete. It succeeded tactically but fell short strategically."
His indictment of the military commanders who are now advising Obama includes the question by a retired officer. "Why did the American military establishment so fail to come up with a war-winning strategy that it was up to a retired general and a civilian think thank...to do their job? This is a stunning indictment of the American military's top leadership."
Today's Baghdad bombing with a toll of 33, along with an attack that killed 28 on Sunday, according to the New York Times, "suggest a renewed ability by insurgents to mount more effective suicide bombings, after a long period in which such attacks were relatively few and less lethal because of heavy security precautions."
With all the attention on the economy, there are sobering indications that the American Military Establishment may not have changed much since it misled another new American president into the Bay of Pigs almost half a century ago. Like Obama, JFK had the brains but not the experience to understand what he was being drawn into.
Kennedy learned fast. Will Obama?
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